pokeymans update
Mar. 29th, 2025 07:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarlingoneSo I got tired of catching a new pokemon on every route, since I had most of the common ones and the new ones becoming available weren't especially useful to me (Girafarig's Normal/Psychic typing basically removes Psychic's Fighting resistance at the cost of also giving it a Ghost immunity, for instance), which was the main reason I'd started writing things down here, so I fell off of doing that. But apparently people have been interested, so, uh.
Well, the nuzlocke fell apart at gym seven -- I lost two pokemon of level 50+ in the level 42 Ice gym, because I screwed up my type resistances and managed to send in two pokemon that were weak to Ice, partly because I didn't expect a Medicham to have an Ice move (it can learn Ice Punch, it turns out) and hadn't read my reference material closely enough to realize that it would.
I knew I was probably going to get upset and end the nuzlocke as soon as I lost one of my major players, but I didn't expect that to happen until the Elite Four, a gauntlet of bosses that you face after the eight gyms, where you can only bring in six pokemon to face a total of 26 high-level pokemon (four teams of five and the Champion's team of six) with only whatever healing items you bring in. Diamond/Pearl/Platinum reportedly already had one of the more terrifying boss gauntlets, and BDSP rebalanced them to have functionally perfect stats and the sorts of competitive strategies you'd see from a high-level human PVP player, so I knew that was going to be brutal, but the Ice gym should have been totally steamrollable. It would have been, if I hadn't screwed up. (Just bring in the damn Fire-type, don't try to be clever.)
What surprised me was how angry I got. I've never been much for ragequitting; I tend to annoyance-quit or frustration-quit long before I get there. But I genuinely wanted to smash my Switch Lite for a second, and mainly stopped myself because my other games are in there.
Then I wound up spending a couple of days pondering reasons I keep not getting along with Pokemon as a set of games or a franchise. I think some of it has to do with my personal temperament, and some to do with the... I always wish I had better words to talk about game design, I know there are people who talk very thoughtfully about it and have high-level theory stuff going on, but I'm not involved enough in gaming spaces to follow those conversations or sort them out from the massive amounts of clickbait that just echoes accepted opinions.
The attitude, I guess, of the franchise? The design assumptions that go into it. Obviously it's a FOMO franchise right from the slogan, and I knew I get annoyed at the blatant cash-grab aspects that go into catching 'em all, the version exclusives (make sure your family buys two copies and push your friends to do the same!) and the limited-release mythicals (better buy it soon or that empty slot in your Pokedex will annoy you like a missing tooth!) and so forth. But it also has some basic structural assumptions I've been struggling to articulate to myself for a while.
I'm going to tangent for a second and talk about Breath of the Wild, one of my favorite games. This part is why it's taken me so long to write this post, more or less -- I had to wait until I felt like booting up my laptop, because I can't type nearly fast enough on a phone to follow my trains of thought.
So Breath of the Wild is a true open world; once you finish the tutorial area, you can go anywhere if you have the skill to not die doing it. The speedrun record, from gaining control to killing the final boss, stands at 23 minutes and 1 second, and the undisputed best BotW speedrunner ever (one Player5 on Youtube and Twitch) has been throwing himself at that minute barrier for forty-odd days now. More than half of that time is the tutorial level. If you're not speedrunning, you can easily spend thousands of hours and still not see everything.
BotW launched in 2017 along with the Switch and revolutionized gaming. Every franchise had to do the open-world thing. How well or poorly they managed it says a lot about both how well they understood BotW's success and how well they understood the basic assumptions of their own franchise. The Dark Souls team, for instance, turned out the critically acclaimed Elden Ring, which isn't too surprising because BotW takes inspiration for its skill-gating combat mechanics from the some of the ways soulsbornes work.
Pokemon... has not handled the open-world fiat well. It's always been a franchise where you had to tackle the "dungeons" (gyms) in a set order, gated by the progression mechanics called Hidden Moves that you gain access to after each gym: you learned Cut, now you can cut down the cuttable saplings that blocked your access to the next area, have fun with your new access.
Pokemon's first attempt at copying Breath of the Wild, and I use that term deliberately, was the spinoff game Pokemon Legends: Arceus, touted as Pokemon's first open-world game (like every other game that tried to capitalize on BotW's success). It begins with exactly the same shot as BotW, a pinprick golden light and fading-in voiceover awakening the player, and references it heavily in everything from combat mechanics to boss battle themeing. It's almost universally acclaimed, and it annoys the hell out of me -- not just because I like BotW better, although I do. But I think the reasons it and the next *heavy airquotes* "open-world" Pokemon games, Scarlet and Violet, annoy me are reasons that speak to a fundamental attitude of the franchise developers.
Let me be blunt: Scarlet and Violet are a glitchy mess. There's a tumblr post I cannot find again that explained how the ocean surrounding the land of Paldea is, for no known reason, the size of the sun and programmed to always be rendered in the background, causing major frame drops and even full game crashes on the Switch's low-RAM hardware. Collision is deeply fucked; I once tried to do a casual no-fast-travel playthrough and got clipped inside a building wall when a Drowzee forced me into combat, and had to warp out because the walls have two-way collision. The camera regularly gets stuck underground during battles, and it's not unusual to see a normally landbound wild pokemon spawned in at the bottom of a pond.
Neither PLA nor SV have any dynamic level scaling. One thing BotW did to keep the game from being too hard or easy was that certain enemies will change level based on how many hidden XP points the player has acquired from killing specific tough enemies -- for example, you'll see a camp that has two blue (level 2) enemies and one red (level 1) enemy, and if you return to that same camp at the right points, you'll find that perhaps the blue enemies stay blue but the red enemy ranks up to blue, then black, then silver, then if you're playing on the DLC hard mode, gold. Most weapons placed in the world will also improve with level scaling, so that you're not trying to kill an 8000-health enemy with an early-game 14-damage sword.
PLA simply locks you out of accessing higher-level areas until you've done enough XP-granting tasks to reach a certain level, which it hopes will correspond to you having a good enough team of evolved Pokemon to tackle the next area. It's not fully an open world, more of a series of open-ish areas accessed from a hub town with a "travel to this area" screen at the exit gate. SV... oh, SV handles it really badly. I know they were under a lot of crunch, but it's bad.
(Look, SV was so notorious for being rushed, botched, and glitchy that the BotW sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, literally added an extra year to their development timeline just for bug patching before release. It paid off, too; no game that involves a mechanic of "you can stick anything to any other thing, either in your weapon inventory or in the overworld, and get semi-realistic physics results from thousands of combinations" has any right to be as glitch-free as TotK is.)
SV has, technically, an open world. Once you beat the tutorial by making it to the school you attend and getting your rideable Pokemon companion, you can go anywhere... sort of. Hidden Moves are replaced by "abilities" your ride pokemon needs to regain, such as swimming, high jump, gliding, and climbing cliff walls. For instance, before you unlock the swim/surf ability, if you step into water more than about knee height, you'll get a black screen and be warped back to shore with the message "You managed to scramble back out of the water!" Each ability is gated behind a "Titan Pokemon" boss battle, with standard Pokemon turn-based combat but with soulsborne-style multiple health bars. Between the five boss battles that gate traversal, the eight standard gyms, and the five bases of the antagonistic Team Star, there's a boss for every one of the eighteen Pokemon types, which is honestly a bit clever. (Some of the early decisions made before crunch hit are genuinely solid; Team Star's storyline is very nicely thought out.)
My point is, if I can ever get to it -- I have to loop back to BotW's world design. Which is very realistic in ways that please my little frustrated-geologist heart (they have sugarloaf mountains! I can climb them!), and so attentive to detail that there's literally a version of Geoguessr based on the BotW map because every view is that unique, but my point is that BotW's basic design philosophy for when they were first building the map is a big part of what makes it such an immersive game. They always wanted another point of interest on the horizon to draw you further in. If you leave the tutorial area in the direction the game suggests, you'll encounter some small ruins to explore with enemies and loot chests. You can wander off toward another ruin on a hilltop nearby, which gives you an excellent view of several other interesting places to glide down to, or you can follow the road east and come to a huge fallen tree trunk which invites you to tangent up through it to the top of another hill, from which you can get to a stone tower with a money chest back by the road, at the base of which is your first merchant who teaches you to buy and sell. It's all very smoothly integrated.
The basic philosophy of Scarlet and Violet's world design specifically is kind of the opposite of that, and in a way that I think speaks to the philosophy of Pokemon as a whole. Most "hills" in SV are cliffs that are just a little bit too high to jump up until you get the high jump ability, whose boss battle is level 25. (You're not even supposed to be able to reach that boss until closer to level 30 due to a roadblock, but there's a spot you can cross the river early.) So you're supposed to explore a bunch, pick up items, and you're supposed to see points of interest that are just a little bit out of reach and have to leave them and come back later.
In brief, BotW's philosophy is "if you can see it, you can get there". You might have to fill your pockets with stamina-restoring meals to get anywhere close, and you might regret it when you do get there if you're not sufficiently prepared, but the game has no interest in actively stopping you. SV's philosophy feels kind of like "fuck you, come back with a warrant", or at least with about thirty more levels and another couple of badges.
And I think, to finally try to get somewhere in the vicinity of my point, that that's the biggest thing I find frustrating about Pokemon. It doesn't want you to succeed. Or, well, it wants you to fail first, to throw yourself at obstacles and have to try different things before it lets you succeed. And it does that in "gotcha" ways that feel kind of mean-spirited -- surprising you with enemy pokemon that have no type weaknesses, setting you up to prepare for one type of battle and then forcing you into a different one, giving bosses type coverages you could only predict if you look up their exact moves or happened to main the specific pokemon they use in a previous game so you know everything it can learn.
In some ways, it's kind of like a turn-based soulsborne. Not in the aesthetic, obviously, and not in the realtime combat aspect, but it's very much a game style where the developers are working against you, actively trying to kick your ass so that you presumably feel more accomplished when you succeed. As opposed to a game where the devs are trying to give you a challenge exactly hard enough that you can beat it the first time if you prepare the way they tell you to, which describes most of the games I've beaten in my life.
(Look, I am a child of severe emotional abuse. Pokemon is designed to fit into a culture of "it's okay to fail, just try again and iterate plans until you succeed". That is not a culture I have ever lived in. It's probably a lesson that would be good to learn at some point, but having a game try to force me to learn it gets quite upsetting, especially when it's a game that starts out by acting like it wants you to succeed until you get to about gym three. At least soulsbornes tell you up front that your ass is there to be kicked. Pokemon tends to feel like a bait and switch.)
Anyway, so then I went to try to transfer my nuzlocke pokemon into Pokemon Home and found out that because my secondary profile doesn't have a separate Nintendo login account, I can't do that anyway, so it's good that I didn't get as far as catching any legendaries on there (which was going to be one of the next steps after gym seven). So I've started a different playthrough on my main profile where I have the Pokemon Home paid subscription.
I definitely established that I prefer having fewer pokemon so I don't have to worry about grinding them all to sufficiently high levels. The rest of the nuzlocke format is too stressful, though, and I definitely want to be able to catch a bunch of the same pokemon until I get one with good stats to raise.
I've just beaten the third gym in this new playthrough -- the game tells you to go to the Fighting gym in Veilstone, but I figured out you can actually go to the Water gym first, they're both level 30, and if you took Turtwig as your starter and have a good Shinx/Luxray you can pretty much sweep the Water gym at that level. The Fighting gym is tougher; the only hard counter to Maylene's Machoke that it can't hit with any supereffective moves is Fairy-type, since these are remakes of Gen4 and Fairy didn't exist yet in the originals, but does exist in the remakes. So I put in a lot of work finding a Cleffa with special attack up and getting it evolved into a Clefable that knows Moon Blast.
(Currently I have a Turtwig and Shinx with Everstones because if you keep them from evolving until level 36, they learn powerful moves that would otherwise take until level 45 for Torterra and level 56 for Luxray. Also a Gyarados, Staraptor, Ponyta, a Kadabra that I picked up in a trade but haven't found much use for yet, a Graveler that's basically my early-game Ground-type until Torterra evolves and gets Bulldoze, a Gastrodon that just evolved and doesn't have any good Ground moves but does have the ability Storm Drain which makes it immune to Water attacks, a Bronzor that I mainly nabbed because it has Sturdy and so stayed alive at 1hp instead of dying in one hit but actually turned out to have good stats, a Stunky with an ability that gives it a chance to cause flinching on any attack, the Clefable I'm working on leveling to 30 before taking on Maylene... I think there are a couple of others I'm not remembering at the moment. I haven't done any major planning for the Elite Four and Champion battles yet because I've never actually had the nerve to face Dialga after gym seven, but Torterra, Luxray, Skuntank, Clefable, Gastrodon, and either Rapidash or a Flying-type seem to be pretty good type coverage so far. I haven't run across any pure Flying-types though; they're all Flying/Normal or Flying/Dark, either of which removes their Fighting resistance.)
I know I'm going to spend a lot of time after the eighth gym dicking around doing completionist shit, overleveling, and trying to grind money, because I can't do anything about my pokemon's IVs until the postgame (I've never even tried breeding for good IVs) and I'm going to need silly-ass amounts of money if I want to buy EV raising items. Also silly-ass amounts of the EV lowering berries, which you can farm in this game but it takes a while to get your hands on the first ones.
IVs and EVs can... take some explaining. So you have a pokemon of a certain species, I'm not going to use a real example because I don't have them memorized, but let's say I have a level 50 pokemon of a species that has exactly 100 Attack as one of its base stats. Every level 50 pokemon of that species that has no other alterations to its Attack stat will have 100 Attack. There are three things that can alter that attack value. One of them you can't see until postgame, which is the IVs or Individual Values: every pokemon has its six stats, HP, Speed, [physical] Attack, [physical] Defense, Special Attack, and Special Defense, and each of those stats has a hidden modifier anywhere from 0 to 31. There are equations built in so you can't just have a level 1 pokemon hatch with 31 Attack, but at either level 50 or level 100 (I forget which), a pokemon with a perfect Attack IV that would have 100 base Attack from its species stats will instead have 131 Attack. You can see this makes a good deal of difference. All the Elite Four and Champion pokemon in BDSP have perfect IVs in all stats, so they can both deal and soak up significantly more damage than some random pokemon you caught off the road who's at the same level.
Each pokemon also has one of 25 (I think) Natures, which each raise one stat and lower another, excluding HP. There are five neutral Natures where the same stat would be raised and lowered so it cancels out, but other than that, you might have an "Adamant" pokemon who has physical Attack up and Special Attack down, or a "Modest" pokemon with Special Attack up and physical Attack down, or many other combinations. So our hypothetical level 50 pokemon, if it had an Attack up Nature, would have +10% to its Attack stat, or 110 instead of 100. This stacks with IVs, but I don't think there's any multiplicative boost. There might be, though, Pokemon is very math heavy.
EVs are the only part of a pokemon's strength you can train -- IVs and Nature are set when it hatches, although in BDSP's postgame and SV's late midgame, you can get Mint items that will change how the Nature affects the stats, and in SV's postgame, you can access a "Hyper Training" that lets you pay in-game currency to boost a given pokemon's IVs to 31, one at a time or all at once.
EVs stands for Effort Values, and a pokemon gains them by battling. In BDSP and SV, because permanent Experience Share is turned on (it used to be an item in older games that you had to equip on a specific pokemon in order to let it gain experience while in the back of your party, and otherwise only the pokemon that you sent into a battle could level; this is why Gyarados is so overpowered, because you had to send in a Magikarp with no attacks and then switch it out every battle, tanking a hit on your actual fighting pokemon in order to do so)... where was I? Right. So they have permanent Exp Share turned on for all party members, so all party members also get EVs from each battle. Every pokemon gives one or more EVs for a certain stat when it's knocked out or captured, usually relating to its own stats; for instance, a Lechonk, which is a pig pokemon with high HP, gives 1 HP EV.
There are only enough EV points available to each pokemon for it to max two of its six stats. A pokemon that you took through the game and battled whatever you ran into is going to have fairly evenly distributed EVs, which is kind of crap when compared to one that has maxed its EVs for, say, Attack and Speed. BDSP's Elite Four and Champion pokemon all have perfectly distributed EVs stacked with their perfect IVs and Natures, so they're the best possible pokemon of those species that anyone could have at those levels.
In order to redistribute a pokemon's EVs, you have to feed them certain specific berries -- there's one each that lowers EVs on one stat, so you might want to feed them the berries that lower Defense or Special Defense EVs and then raise their EVs in another stat, either by battling a certain species of pokemon and running away from other encounters, or by feeding them stat-boosting "vitamins" for the stats you want. Getting enough berries of the right types is a pain; in SV, you can't farm them, so you have to savescum the daily auctions in those games to find job-lots of the berries you want. In BDSP, at least you can farm them, but it's very not fast. But it's the only way I can improve my ragtag team of pokemon's chances against the final boss gauntlet, other than overleveling and the farming I did to get reasonably good Natures when I was catching them. Well, and changing their actual moves and held items, but you know what I mean.
Well, the nuzlocke fell apart at gym seven -- I lost two pokemon of level 50+ in the level 42 Ice gym, because I screwed up my type resistances and managed to send in two pokemon that were weak to Ice, partly because I didn't expect a Medicham to have an Ice move (it can learn Ice Punch, it turns out) and hadn't read my reference material closely enough to realize that it would.
I knew I was probably going to get upset and end the nuzlocke as soon as I lost one of my major players, but I didn't expect that to happen until the Elite Four, a gauntlet of bosses that you face after the eight gyms, where you can only bring in six pokemon to face a total of 26 high-level pokemon (four teams of five and the Champion's team of six) with only whatever healing items you bring in. Diamond/Pearl/Platinum reportedly already had one of the more terrifying boss gauntlets, and BDSP rebalanced them to have functionally perfect stats and the sorts of competitive strategies you'd see from a high-level human PVP player, so I knew that was going to be brutal, but the Ice gym should have been totally steamrollable. It would have been, if I hadn't screwed up. (Just bring in the damn Fire-type, don't try to be clever.)
What surprised me was how angry I got. I've never been much for ragequitting; I tend to annoyance-quit or frustration-quit long before I get there. But I genuinely wanted to smash my Switch Lite for a second, and mainly stopped myself because my other games are in there.
Then I wound up spending a couple of days pondering reasons I keep not getting along with Pokemon as a set of games or a franchise. I think some of it has to do with my personal temperament, and some to do with the... I always wish I had better words to talk about game design, I know there are people who talk very thoughtfully about it and have high-level theory stuff going on, but I'm not involved enough in gaming spaces to follow those conversations or sort them out from the massive amounts of clickbait that just echoes accepted opinions.
The attitude, I guess, of the franchise? The design assumptions that go into it. Obviously it's a FOMO franchise right from the slogan, and I knew I get annoyed at the blatant cash-grab aspects that go into catching 'em all, the version exclusives (make sure your family buys two copies and push your friends to do the same!) and the limited-release mythicals (better buy it soon or that empty slot in your Pokedex will annoy you like a missing tooth!) and so forth. But it also has some basic structural assumptions I've been struggling to articulate to myself for a while.
I'm going to tangent for a second and talk about Breath of the Wild, one of my favorite games. This part is why it's taken me so long to write this post, more or less -- I had to wait until I felt like booting up my laptop, because I can't type nearly fast enough on a phone to follow my trains of thought.
So Breath of the Wild is a true open world; once you finish the tutorial area, you can go anywhere if you have the skill to not die doing it. The speedrun record, from gaining control to killing the final boss, stands at 23 minutes and 1 second, and the undisputed best BotW speedrunner ever (one Player5 on Youtube and Twitch) has been throwing himself at that minute barrier for forty-odd days now. More than half of that time is the tutorial level. If you're not speedrunning, you can easily spend thousands of hours and still not see everything.
BotW launched in 2017 along with the Switch and revolutionized gaming. Every franchise had to do the open-world thing. How well or poorly they managed it says a lot about both how well they understood BotW's success and how well they understood the basic assumptions of their own franchise. The Dark Souls team, for instance, turned out the critically acclaimed Elden Ring, which isn't too surprising because BotW takes inspiration for its skill-gating combat mechanics from the some of the ways soulsbornes work.
Pokemon... has not handled the open-world fiat well. It's always been a franchise where you had to tackle the "dungeons" (gyms) in a set order, gated by the progression mechanics called Hidden Moves that you gain access to after each gym: you learned Cut, now you can cut down the cuttable saplings that blocked your access to the next area, have fun with your new access.
Pokemon's first attempt at copying Breath of the Wild, and I use that term deliberately, was the spinoff game Pokemon Legends: Arceus, touted as Pokemon's first open-world game (like every other game that tried to capitalize on BotW's success). It begins with exactly the same shot as BotW, a pinprick golden light and fading-in voiceover awakening the player, and references it heavily in everything from combat mechanics to boss battle themeing. It's almost universally acclaimed, and it annoys the hell out of me -- not just because I like BotW better, although I do. But I think the reasons it and the next *heavy airquotes* "open-world" Pokemon games, Scarlet and Violet, annoy me are reasons that speak to a fundamental attitude of the franchise developers.
Let me be blunt: Scarlet and Violet are a glitchy mess. There's a tumblr post I cannot find again that explained how the ocean surrounding the land of Paldea is, for no known reason, the size of the sun and programmed to always be rendered in the background, causing major frame drops and even full game crashes on the Switch's low-RAM hardware. Collision is deeply fucked; I once tried to do a casual no-fast-travel playthrough and got clipped inside a building wall when a Drowzee forced me into combat, and had to warp out because the walls have two-way collision. The camera regularly gets stuck underground during battles, and it's not unusual to see a normally landbound wild pokemon spawned in at the bottom of a pond.
Neither PLA nor SV have any dynamic level scaling. One thing BotW did to keep the game from being too hard or easy was that certain enemies will change level based on how many hidden XP points the player has acquired from killing specific tough enemies -- for example, you'll see a camp that has two blue (level 2) enemies and one red (level 1) enemy, and if you return to that same camp at the right points, you'll find that perhaps the blue enemies stay blue but the red enemy ranks up to blue, then black, then silver, then if you're playing on the DLC hard mode, gold. Most weapons placed in the world will also improve with level scaling, so that you're not trying to kill an 8000-health enemy with an early-game 14-damage sword.
PLA simply locks you out of accessing higher-level areas until you've done enough XP-granting tasks to reach a certain level, which it hopes will correspond to you having a good enough team of evolved Pokemon to tackle the next area. It's not fully an open world, more of a series of open-ish areas accessed from a hub town with a "travel to this area" screen at the exit gate. SV... oh, SV handles it really badly. I know they were under a lot of crunch, but it's bad.
(Look, SV was so notorious for being rushed, botched, and glitchy that the BotW sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, literally added an extra year to their development timeline just for bug patching before release. It paid off, too; no game that involves a mechanic of "you can stick anything to any other thing, either in your weapon inventory or in the overworld, and get semi-realistic physics results from thousands of combinations" has any right to be as glitch-free as TotK is.)
SV has, technically, an open world. Once you beat the tutorial by making it to the school you attend and getting your rideable Pokemon companion, you can go anywhere... sort of. Hidden Moves are replaced by "abilities" your ride pokemon needs to regain, such as swimming, high jump, gliding, and climbing cliff walls. For instance, before you unlock the swim/surf ability, if you step into water more than about knee height, you'll get a black screen and be warped back to shore with the message "You managed to scramble back out of the water!" Each ability is gated behind a "Titan Pokemon" boss battle, with standard Pokemon turn-based combat but with soulsborne-style multiple health bars. Between the five boss battles that gate traversal, the eight standard gyms, and the five bases of the antagonistic Team Star, there's a boss for every one of the eighteen Pokemon types, which is honestly a bit clever. (Some of the early decisions made before crunch hit are genuinely solid; Team Star's storyline is very nicely thought out.)
My point is, if I can ever get to it -- I have to loop back to BotW's world design. Which is very realistic in ways that please my little frustrated-geologist heart (they have sugarloaf mountains! I can climb them!), and so attentive to detail that there's literally a version of Geoguessr based on the BotW map because every view is that unique, but my point is that BotW's basic design philosophy for when they were first building the map is a big part of what makes it such an immersive game. They always wanted another point of interest on the horizon to draw you further in. If you leave the tutorial area in the direction the game suggests, you'll encounter some small ruins to explore with enemies and loot chests. You can wander off toward another ruin on a hilltop nearby, which gives you an excellent view of several other interesting places to glide down to, or you can follow the road east and come to a huge fallen tree trunk which invites you to tangent up through it to the top of another hill, from which you can get to a stone tower with a money chest back by the road, at the base of which is your first merchant who teaches you to buy and sell. It's all very smoothly integrated.
The basic philosophy of Scarlet and Violet's world design specifically is kind of the opposite of that, and in a way that I think speaks to the philosophy of Pokemon as a whole. Most "hills" in SV are cliffs that are just a little bit too high to jump up until you get the high jump ability, whose boss battle is level 25. (You're not even supposed to be able to reach that boss until closer to level 30 due to a roadblock, but there's a spot you can cross the river early.) So you're supposed to explore a bunch, pick up items, and you're supposed to see points of interest that are just a little bit out of reach and have to leave them and come back later.
In brief, BotW's philosophy is "if you can see it, you can get there". You might have to fill your pockets with stamina-restoring meals to get anywhere close, and you might regret it when you do get there if you're not sufficiently prepared, but the game has no interest in actively stopping you. SV's philosophy feels kind of like "fuck you, come back with a warrant", or at least with about thirty more levels and another couple of badges.
And I think, to finally try to get somewhere in the vicinity of my point, that that's the biggest thing I find frustrating about Pokemon. It doesn't want you to succeed. Or, well, it wants you to fail first, to throw yourself at obstacles and have to try different things before it lets you succeed. And it does that in "gotcha" ways that feel kind of mean-spirited -- surprising you with enemy pokemon that have no type weaknesses, setting you up to prepare for one type of battle and then forcing you into a different one, giving bosses type coverages you could only predict if you look up their exact moves or happened to main the specific pokemon they use in a previous game so you know everything it can learn.
In some ways, it's kind of like a turn-based soulsborne. Not in the aesthetic, obviously, and not in the realtime combat aspect, but it's very much a game style where the developers are working against you, actively trying to kick your ass so that you presumably feel more accomplished when you succeed. As opposed to a game where the devs are trying to give you a challenge exactly hard enough that you can beat it the first time if you prepare the way they tell you to, which describes most of the games I've beaten in my life.
(Look, I am a child of severe emotional abuse. Pokemon is designed to fit into a culture of "it's okay to fail, just try again and iterate plans until you succeed". That is not a culture I have ever lived in. It's probably a lesson that would be good to learn at some point, but having a game try to force me to learn it gets quite upsetting, especially when it's a game that starts out by acting like it wants you to succeed until you get to about gym three. At least soulsbornes tell you up front that your ass is there to be kicked. Pokemon tends to feel like a bait and switch.)
Anyway, so then I went to try to transfer my nuzlocke pokemon into Pokemon Home and found out that because my secondary profile doesn't have a separate Nintendo login account, I can't do that anyway, so it's good that I didn't get as far as catching any legendaries on there (which was going to be one of the next steps after gym seven). So I've started a different playthrough on my main profile where I have the Pokemon Home paid subscription.
I definitely established that I prefer having fewer pokemon so I don't have to worry about grinding them all to sufficiently high levels. The rest of the nuzlocke format is too stressful, though, and I definitely want to be able to catch a bunch of the same pokemon until I get one with good stats to raise.
I've just beaten the third gym in this new playthrough -- the game tells you to go to the Fighting gym in Veilstone, but I figured out you can actually go to the Water gym first, they're both level 30, and if you took Turtwig as your starter and have a good Shinx/Luxray you can pretty much sweep the Water gym at that level. The Fighting gym is tougher; the only hard counter to Maylene's Machoke that it can't hit with any supereffective moves is Fairy-type, since these are remakes of Gen4 and Fairy didn't exist yet in the originals, but does exist in the remakes. So I put in a lot of work finding a Cleffa with special attack up and getting it evolved into a Clefable that knows Moon Blast.
(Currently I have a Turtwig and Shinx with Everstones because if you keep them from evolving until level 36, they learn powerful moves that would otherwise take until level 45 for Torterra and level 56 for Luxray. Also a Gyarados, Staraptor, Ponyta, a Kadabra that I picked up in a trade but haven't found much use for yet, a Graveler that's basically my early-game Ground-type until Torterra evolves and gets Bulldoze, a Gastrodon that just evolved and doesn't have any good Ground moves but does have the ability Storm Drain which makes it immune to Water attacks, a Bronzor that I mainly nabbed because it has Sturdy and so stayed alive at 1hp instead of dying in one hit but actually turned out to have good stats, a Stunky with an ability that gives it a chance to cause flinching on any attack, the Clefable I'm working on leveling to 30 before taking on Maylene... I think there are a couple of others I'm not remembering at the moment. I haven't done any major planning for the Elite Four and Champion battles yet because I've never actually had the nerve to face Dialga after gym seven, but Torterra, Luxray, Skuntank, Clefable, Gastrodon, and either Rapidash or a Flying-type seem to be pretty good type coverage so far. I haven't run across any pure Flying-types though; they're all Flying/Normal or Flying/Dark, either of which removes their Fighting resistance.)
I know I'm going to spend a lot of time after the eighth gym dicking around doing completionist shit, overleveling, and trying to grind money, because I can't do anything about my pokemon's IVs until the postgame (I've never even tried breeding for good IVs) and I'm going to need silly-ass amounts of money if I want to buy EV raising items. Also silly-ass amounts of the EV lowering berries, which you can farm in this game but it takes a while to get your hands on the first ones.
IVs and EVs can... take some explaining. So you have a pokemon of a certain species, I'm not going to use a real example because I don't have them memorized, but let's say I have a level 50 pokemon of a species that has exactly 100 Attack as one of its base stats. Every level 50 pokemon of that species that has no other alterations to its Attack stat will have 100 Attack. There are three things that can alter that attack value. One of them you can't see until postgame, which is the IVs or Individual Values: every pokemon has its six stats, HP, Speed, [physical] Attack, [physical] Defense, Special Attack, and Special Defense, and each of those stats has a hidden modifier anywhere from 0 to 31. There are equations built in so you can't just have a level 1 pokemon hatch with 31 Attack, but at either level 50 or level 100 (I forget which), a pokemon with a perfect Attack IV that would have 100 base Attack from its species stats will instead have 131 Attack. You can see this makes a good deal of difference. All the Elite Four and Champion pokemon in BDSP have perfect IVs in all stats, so they can both deal and soak up significantly more damage than some random pokemon you caught off the road who's at the same level.
Each pokemon also has one of 25 (I think) Natures, which each raise one stat and lower another, excluding HP. There are five neutral Natures where the same stat would be raised and lowered so it cancels out, but other than that, you might have an "Adamant" pokemon who has physical Attack up and Special Attack down, or a "Modest" pokemon with Special Attack up and physical Attack down, or many other combinations. So our hypothetical level 50 pokemon, if it had an Attack up Nature, would have +10% to its Attack stat, or 110 instead of 100. This stacks with IVs, but I don't think there's any multiplicative boost. There might be, though, Pokemon is very math heavy.
EVs are the only part of a pokemon's strength you can train -- IVs and Nature are set when it hatches, although in BDSP's postgame and SV's late midgame, you can get Mint items that will change how the Nature affects the stats, and in SV's postgame, you can access a "Hyper Training" that lets you pay in-game currency to boost a given pokemon's IVs to 31, one at a time or all at once.
EVs stands for Effort Values, and a pokemon gains them by battling. In BDSP and SV, because permanent Experience Share is turned on (it used to be an item in older games that you had to equip on a specific pokemon in order to let it gain experience while in the back of your party, and otherwise only the pokemon that you sent into a battle could level; this is why Gyarados is so overpowered, because you had to send in a Magikarp with no attacks and then switch it out every battle, tanking a hit on your actual fighting pokemon in order to do so)... where was I? Right. So they have permanent Exp Share turned on for all party members, so all party members also get EVs from each battle. Every pokemon gives one or more EVs for a certain stat when it's knocked out or captured, usually relating to its own stats; for instance, a Lechonk, which is a pig pokemon with high HP, gives 1 HP EV.
There are only enough EV points available to each pokemon for it to max two of its six stats. A pokemon that you took through the game and battled whatever you ran into is going to have fairly evenly distributed EVs, which is kind of crap when compared to one that has maxed its EVs for, say, Attack and Speed. BDSP's Elite Four and Champion pokemon all have perfectly distributed EVs stacked with their perfect IVs and Natures, so they're the best possible pokemon of those species that anyone could have at those levels.
In order to redistribute a pokemon's EVs, you have to feed them certain specific berries -- there's one each that lowers EVs on one stat, so you might want to feed them the berries that lower Defense or Special Defense EVs and then raise their EVs in another stat, either by battling a certain species of pokemon and running away from other encounters, or by feeding them stat-boosting "vitamins" for the stats you want. Getting enough berries of the right types is a pain; in SV, you can't farm them, so you have to savescum the daily auctions in those games to find job-lots of the berries you want. In BDSP, at least you can farm them, but it's very not fast. But it's the only way I can improve my ragtag team of pokemon's chances against the final boss gauntlet, other than overleveling and the farming I did to get reasonably good Natures when I was catching them. Well, and changing their actual moves and held items, but you know what I mean.
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Date: 2025-03-30 04:27 am (UTC)This was interesting reading, the comparison of Pokemon and BotW is something I wasn't really aware of, but I do know a number of people who might have played Pokemon at one point, but continue to play BotW, and this kind of explains the why.